Eye Magazine

Despite being a British graphic designer (a species branded as ‘excessively mean’ by the editor of another design magazine) I really wanted to give a Black (gold) Pencil to some fellow (non-British) designers when I sat on the Book Design jury for the D&AD [Design and Art Direction] Awards earlier this year.

What is it about the size and weight of the journal format that makes it seem so right just now?

A few pictures from the Eye party at Kemistry.

Above: D&AD guest finds someone to take home. (Who is this? let us know!) Photograph: Christine Donnier-Valentin.

In Eye no. 67, Steven Heller reviewed Paper Tigers (Chronicle) the Cushing and Tompkins book about Chinese posters from 1966-76, the period known as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. You can read his review here, and see below for some images we didn’t have room to show in the published issue.

Graphic design heroes might be, as Martha Scotford noted, Western white men, but they’re a particular kind of Western, white, man: there are few Finns, Greeks or Irish in the canon. As a 1992 article in Graphis asked: ‘Where are the Paul O’Rands, the Milton McGlasers?’

Jennifer Campbell-Colquhoun and Selina Swayne want to know what you think about graphic design and designers. Their project Stock aims ‘to take a snapshot

Artists are often reluctant to be labelled, except perhaps when it comes to seeing their work on a beer label.

When I asked a member of Sheffield’s Millennium Gallery staff where I’d find the Advanced Beauty exhibition of digital video art, he politely confessed to having no idea what I was talking about, writes David Thompson.

During the 1965-73 Vietnam war, writes David Barringer, American soldiers etched slogans and images on to the metal of the Zippo lighters they carried with them, and which, notoriously, were on occasion used to set huts on fire.